Top 10 Free WordPress Plugins of the Month — October 2013

The varied nature of this month’s selection made it difficult to order them, simply because they are all excellent in their own right. If I had to tie them together with a unifying theme, it would be this: these plugins will make your life easier.

There are plugins here that will help you style and tweak your site. There are plugins that help with your SEO and security and there are plugins that will when added to your site will make it look great.

I’ve no doubt that whatever you use your WordPress website for, you will find something in the selection this month that will improve it. Enjoy!

This is a very useful and simple plugin for creating a custom maintenance mode page for your website whenever you need to carry out maintenance. The plugin comes with multiple styles and you can also completely customize the page template it to match your current site design.

This plugin allows your readers to include an image in their comments on your site. The PNG, GIF, JPG, and JPEG image types are supported and all uploaded images can be styled to ensure they fit into your theme’s comment area.

Comment Images is not compatible with JetPack, IntenseDebate, or Disqus comments. At the moment it will only work the default WordPress comments system, though development is underway to make it compatible with these other comments systems.

Tweaking image border can be a problem if you aren’t comfortable editing CSS. This plugin takes all of the effort out of this making this style choice. It allows you to completely remove image borders with a single checkbox or customize them in multiple ways.

This is an excellent plugin if you run a food blog or if you occasionally post recipes to your website.

Recipe Card allows you to choose from a number of styles for your recipe and allows your readers to print, save, and review them. The plugin also automatically optimizes your recipe for search engines and produces a nutrition guide for each recipe you post.

Rich Snippets allows you to completely customize your site snippets and add features into them to make them even more useful.

It gives you the option to add photos, a rating system and other features. It also allows you to specify what is shown using different content types that helps to improve your SEO and search engine rankings.

This plugin allows you to scan your website for malware and other vulnerabilities by using the Sucuri SiteCheck service. It can detect various types of malware, spam injections, website errors, site blacklisting, code anomalies and numerous other potential security issues.

Sucuri Scanner alone won’t be enough to completely secure your website but with all of the features in uses it will go a very long way to keeping your site clean and safe. I highly recommend that you install this plugin.

The default WordPress gallery has improved over the years but it still isn’t very flexible. If you need to have more options for your image galleries then this is a great plugin for you.

Easy Image Gallery allows you to add galleries to Posts and Pages using shortcodes and then displays a meta-box on the publishing screen. When the images are added to the gallery, the plugin allows you to re-order them and to have each image link to a larger version of itself.

The plugin is compatible with a few LightBox scripts out of the box, and allows developers to add additional LightBox scripts with hooks and filters. The developer has supplied a handy tutorial to do this.

OTW Portfolio Light is a very simple yet excellent portfolio plugin for anyone who needs to display a collection of their work. The plugin is responsive ensuring that your portfolio will look just as good on any screen size.

Portfolios can be added to any post or page using a simple shortcode. Each item in your portfolio can be given a description that appears when you hover over it and will also be linked to an additional page on your site where you can add more details about the portfolio item. These pages can have multiple images added to them that will be displayed in a stylish image slider.

The plugin comes with two distinct display styles. You can categorize and then filter your portfolio items on a single page, or you can use a paginated style that will allow a specified number of items before creating additional portfolio pages.

This is a very simple plugin that can be used to make sure one or more widgets from your sidebar are always displayed on the page. This plugin is extremely useful for ensuring that important plugins are always in the eyeline of your readers. The brief video above shows you this plugin in action.

An excellent example of this plugin being used could be to ensure that a widget to sign up for your newsletter is always at the top of the screen, regardless of how far down the page a reader scrolls. Alternatively, freelancers or companies could use the plugin to ensure a widget that contains details on hiring them is always displayed.

It is an excellent plugin for those widgets you want your readers to take action on and displays them in a very simple and non-intrusive way that I really like.

Tom Ewer

Tom Ewer is the founder of WordCandy.co. He has been a huge fan of WordPress since he first laid eyes on it, and has been writing educational and informative content for WordPress users since 2011. When he's not working, you're likely to find him outdoors somewhere – as far away from a screen as possible!

Tom Ewer

Jon Tacit

Thanks a bunch Tom… my site is just used as a personal blog more or less… at least that is what it has turned into. Before i knew it i had some 30+ plugins running all at once, somehow still wondering why my page speed was so slow… LMAO. Its silly i know, but sometimes you just don’t realize how much stuff gets built up over time, and if you are a struggling full time college student like me – its easy to get behind & let your plugins get out of control… so just wanted to say thanks for the great post, i found you by asking google what are the ONLY wordpress plugins i need running, and from reading your post i learned a few extra things i wasnt expecting about w3 total cache… Thanks man

Tom Ewer

Jeri Burtchell

I just about swooned when I saw the recipe card plugin! That is awesome!

On number 9, Comments Images, (which would pair nicely with the recipe card plugin) do you know if there is any worry about injection malware or other nefarious activity that could be done with an upload function?

I’m not too savvy when it comes to WP. I’ve done a bunch of work on various shopping cart software like Zen-Cart however and the images folder and any uploaders were always prime targets for hackers.

Also, do you know of a built in function or widget for cross promoting other posts at the end of a post? I particularly like the ones that display the “you might also like…” entries in a grid of featured images.

Mehreen

Tom Ewer

Stacie

Thanks for the information! I’ve been looking for information like this one!

I hope our plugin – uberoptin will also be included in time 🙂 By the way, we accept affiliates. We would love to have you on board! If you would like to register, you are very welcome here 🙂 uberwp.com/affliates